I’d like to congratulate the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, who patiently persisted in their quest to turn Camp 4 into reservation land and finally made it happen!
With the flick of President Donald Trump’s wrist and a little bit of work on U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal’s (D-Santa Barbara) part, the devil was in the details of the National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump signed in December. The bill included pay raises for service members, paid family leave for federal employees, and research funding for universities, alongside language that mirrors a bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale) a number of times on behalf of the tribe since 2013. Whew! That’s a long time.
I bet all of those anti-Chumash residents who call themselves the Santa Ynez Valley Concerned Citizens and Santa Ynez Valley Coalition are positively itching to sue Congress and the president over this. Just give them one shot!
Pretty soon, the tribe is going to start building those ranch houses that look like all of the others in the valley! Gasp!
I also want to highlight a couple of doozies from 2019’s list of headlines, starting with Solvang. The city fought with the Solvang Conference & Visitors Bureau for months over a contract, finally ending things between the two. But the saga didn’t end there. Nope! City Attorney Chip Wullbrandt had to chase Solvang’s bureau assets all over town, including $16,000 that the wily, pissed off ex-bureau President Kim Jensen donated to the Central Coast Film Society, and the city is still missing some technological components! What a troublemaker!
But, the city got national notoriety for the Julefest drone show, which it never would have put on if Jensen was still in charge, so there’s that!
Then there’s the H-2A housing hullabaloo that got Santa Maria all hot and bothered this year. For months and months, discussions about a potential employee housing ordinance dragged out, dragging racists, activists, concerned residents, farmers, and contracted farmworkers to almost every meeting.
City Councilmember Etta Waterfield was the sole vote against the ordinance Santa Maria passed, saying she was concerned about “protecting” neighborhoods from the influx of farmworkers. She wanted people to house farmworkers on their own land, not in city limits. It’s the county’s problem, she said, and shouldn’t be imposed on the city of Santa Maria. Well, farmers didn’t like that too much and she didn’t get what she wanted, but it’s the thought that counts, you know?
My favorite of the year, though, has to be the Lompoc City Council. How much more drama can you pack into a small town’s highest elected governing body? If it wasn’t the budget—and it was mostly all about the budget—it was the police department, which, come to think of it, also had to do with the budget.
With City Councilmember Jim Mosby leading the way, the three musketeers (this includes fellow Councilmembers Victor Vega and Dirk Starbuck) managed to shave a bunch of people out of the city budget, rile up the police department, and eventually ended up doing the very thing they didn’t want to do in the first place: Put a sales tax increase on the ballot.
The canary has to ask: Why fight it? Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 2-9, 2020.